Health care Internet sites have been among the most rapidly growing Internet destinations in terms of consumer/user visits. Such sites offer medical and health care information in the form of news, medical literature or library resources on-line. Often the information is organized along disease lines to facilitate advertising directed at target audiences and to facilitate formation of “chat” or other on-line discussions or support conversations among interested users.
A patient or user of the traditional on-line health sites looking to understand or diagnose a medical situation would require the patient to explain his or her symptoms and then read through discussion of various diseases in a medical reference text (or even an on-line version) while attempting to match his or her symptoms to a disease. This process is much like shopping for items in a grocery store by looking solely at the list of ingredients on package labels and then attempting to find a desired item by locating the matching list of ingredients.
Common tools used to determine probabilities in the clinical research and disease management area have typically revolved around probabilities associated with sensitivity and specificity. Sensitivity is defined as the proportion of false negatives we should expect of people that truly have a disorder. Specificity is defined as the proportion of false positives among those without the disease.
Therefore, despite the proliferation of on-line health care information sites, there is a need to provide an on-line diagnostic system for helping to match symptoms to potential diseases or diagnoses such that a patient can obtain information for traditional sources prior to a visit to a health care professional.